Monday, June 1, 2009

This is a picture of my signal on the panadapter of the Netherlands WEBSDR receiver. The noise floor is -108 dBm and I am running about -82 dBm. I'm the station at 7010. Notice the key clicks on some of the other stations vs my signal. The good old Flex is pretty well click free. I took this picture as the beta test group was wringing out some tweaks to the CW aspect of the radio and I thought it would be cool to take a pic of how the signal looks and pass it around, as well as listen to how it sounds. Clean as a button. I was checking out the keying and was able to do 60 wpm QSK at 10ms delay with no problem with the present iteration. I never use 10ms delay, I generally use 60ms but it works just fine at 10ms

I moved that little tuner out to the antenna today, and it tunes up great. I taped it up in a big baggie to temporarily water proof it till I can get a something better. It was interesting that the tuner has something like 8000 memories and I generally used just one or at best 4 on any band 80-10. Lot of wasted memories I guess. This evening I was following the grey line across Europe as Europe woke up and made about a dozen DX contacts with this wire, 3 radials and 100W with signal strength between S5 and S9 in the reports. No one had a bit of trouble hearing me. Goes to show you, you can have a hell of a LOT of fun with 200ft of wire flipped up in a tree and strung out on the ground.

Call to arms

Hear Ye Hear Ye

If you're interested in writing something interesting for this blog regarding your SDR experience let me know. I would like to include things like how your SDR contest station is set up, or your VHF station that uses SDR as the system center, feats of weak signal work or how well the SDR works in various challenging situations. If you are a foreign ham and would like to comment on the growth of SDR in your particular part of the world. Bring it on!

I reserve the right to publish or not, but I'm pretty open to documenting a wide variety of honest experiences from users, for readers to explore. The understanding of SDR in our hobby is so nascent, that I want the reader to be able to see the value of SDR through the eyes of YOUR experience and enthusiasm.